“There’s never been a time when I’ve said I just wanted to be a kid, because all along I have been just a kid,” she said in the same interview. Hollywood is littered with stories of child stardom’s dangers, but even with the questionable sexualizing of her pure loveliness, Shields seemed remarkably well-adjusted. Was there a wink in this statement, a trace of irony in its saccharine quality? It’s hard to say, and when considering that Shields was paid to be beautiful from her birth (her first brush with stardom came via an Ivory Soap ad as a baby), one can’t help but wonder about her level of self-awareness. I get my quote-unquote highs from other things: babies, guitar music, animals”-and this was two years after she starred in this horny teen opus. In a 1982 interview published in Scavullo Women, a book of beauty tips, she was quoted as saying, “I’m totally against all kinds of drugs. Her public image, even when she was generating controversy, still projected a borderline ridiculous level of naïveté.
The return to the blue lagoon nude scenes series#
Just a few months after the release of "The Blue Lagoon," she appeared in a series of ads for Calvin Klein Jeans, asking in the most notorious of the bunch, "You know what gets between me and my Calvins? Nothing." Citing concerns that the commercial verged on child pornography, CBS refused to air it, and ABC followed suit.Īs a teen star, Shields was presented as a “good girl” whose famously strong brows offset her delicate features. And the sexualization of Shields would continue throughout 1980. "The Blue Lagoon" is lovely to look at (it was shot by Nestor Almendros, who worked with such legendary directors as François Truffaut and Terrence Malick) but suffers from its eye-rolling dialogue and strange softcore-meets-survival-drama tone. Unfortunately, all this sex and subversion of virtue doesn’t add up to a secret feminist masterpiece. By couching sexuality in primitive purity, "The Blue Lagoon" gets away with perversion that would likely be even more controversial today. So yes, the soft-focus montages of teen flesh are gratuitous but the film presents it all as innocent-these kids don’t even know what sex is! They don’t even know how a baby is made! They learn it the hard way, obviously. Teen horniness is guileless, with puberty making itself known through rather obvious dialogue (“I keep having strange thoughts,” says Emmeline, “Why are all these funny hairs growing on me?” asks Richard, etc.) Sexual discovery is here the natural outcome of the storybook (or, if you’re so inclined “biblical") situation. When it comes to the depiction of burgeoning sexuality, "The Blue Lagoon" wants to have it both ways. Shields’ preternatural prettiness is the guiding force of "The Blue Lagoon," and while the hair inspiration she provides is impeccable and her smile is luminous, there’s no way to watch some of the film's more supposedly sensual scenes without cringing. The way the media discussed her verged on fetishistic, and she had already courted controversy with her starring role as a child prostitute in Louis Malle’s " Pretty Baby" (1978), a much better film. In the '70s, of course, Shields was famous for being so beautiful and so young.
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And besides, she’s not really playing a role so much as modeling, filling out a whisper-thin part with beauty. Her performance may not be great, but to call it the worst of that year is too harsh. Shields had the dubious achievement of winning the very first Razzie Award for Worst Actress for her role.
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She does a slightly better job than Christopher Atkins, who, as her cousin/lover (gross, but also kind of inevitable) Richard, delivers his lines woodenly. As Emmeline, a teen who knows only island life, Shields is tasked with making an archetypal naïf of a girl convincing.